2024 CAS Distinguished Research Awards (CASDRA)

Each year the pool of candidates for the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Research Award (CASDRA) consists of those faculty members who are nominated for the Alumni Association for Distinguished Research or Creative Achievement (AADRACA) and who are not selected for an AADRACA that year. There are four recipients this year (Humanities, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences and Engaged Scholarship).

Social Sciences: Keri Brondo, Professor of Anthropology and Associate Dean of Arts & Sciences

Brondo joined the faculty at the University of Memphis in 2007. Her scholarship contributes to basic research, theory, and application in the areas of the anthropology of environment and development, indigenous rights, and gender and social justice. 

Her international research focuses on the relationship between indigenous rights, conservation and development, and local livelihoods, particularly on Honduras' north coast and islands. In the United States, Brondo's work centers on gender equity in anthropological careers and collaborative research on the interconnection between parks, people, and conservation. Dr. Brondo's first solo-authored book, Land Grab, is an ethnographic account of the relationship between identity politics, neoliberal development policy, and rights to resource management in afroindigenous Garifuna communities on the north coast of Honduras. The book employs feminist political ecology and critical race and ethnic studies to shed light on current development paradoxes in Honduras. Her most recent books include Voluntourism and Multispecies Collaboration: Life, Death, and Conservation in the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef (U Arizona Press and winner of the 2022 Ed Bruner Book Prize), which is an ethnographic exploration of the world of conservation voluntourism, conservation voluntourism and its engagement with marine and terrestrial biodiversity on the Bay Island of Utila. She has also produced three textbooks, including Cultural Anthropology: Contemporary, Public, and Critical Readings (Oxford U Press, 2017; 2022), Anthropological Theory for the 21st Century: Thinking with the Canon (U Toronto Press, 2022), a co-edited (w/ L. Bolles, R. Gomberg-Muñoz, and B. Perley), a theory volume for the next generation of aspiring anthropologists, and (w/ L. Vivanco), Culture, Nature, and Sustainability: Anthropological Perspective (forthcoming 2025, Wiley Press).

Brondo is a National Geographic Explorer (2019-2021) and the recipient of several awards, including the Presidential Award from the American Anthropological Association (2016), the Sierra Club's Dick Mochow Environmental Justice Award (2017), Dunavant Faculty Professorship (2016-2019), Early Career Research Award (2010), and two Professional Development Awards (2011, 2019). Additionally, she has over two decades of leadership experience within her discipline's largest professional associations, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Society of Applied Anthropology (SfAA), is a former Fulbright scholar and Title VI FLAS recipient, and is regularly called upon to provide expert testimony on behalf of the Garifuna community for amnesty cases and to serve as amicus curiae for the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights. 

Brondo's newest project in Honduras unites her early work on conservation, dispossession, and Garifuna resistance with her more recent body of work on conservation, cultural heritage, ecological grief, and multispecies relationality to focus on documenting changing human-environment relations and strategies for navigating climate-induced environmental uncertainty among Garifuna and Native Bay Islanders.

Natural Sciences: Francisco Muller-Sanchez, Physics and Materials Science

Francisco Muller-Sanchez is an assistant professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Memphis. He received his Ph.D. degree in Astronomy from the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, working under the supervision of 2020 Nobel Prize Laurate Dr. Reinhard Genzel. Prior to his arrival in Memphis, he spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) in Spain, two years as postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), and five years as research associate at the University of Colorado, Boulder. 

His research focuses on studying the regions around supermassive black holes (SMBHs) with sufficient spatial resolution to directly observe how SMBHs are fueled, how they influence their host galaxies and under what circumstances SMBH pairs make it to the detectable gravitational wave regime. To do this he uses a variety of ground- and space-based telescopes to characterize the environment around SMBHs.

Muller-Sanchez has been Principal Investigator on proposals that use data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, and the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, as well as observing with the Keck telescopes and the Very Large Telescope in Chile. He has received numerous grants and awards from NASA and the UofM to send the students in his lab to carry out the observations and work on these projects. You can learn more about his work here: https://www.memphis.edu/physics/faculty-sanchez/

Humanities: Kathy Lou Schultz, Department of English

Poet-scholar Dr. Kathy Lou Schultz is the author of two scholarly monographs, Introduction to Claudia Rankine (Lake Forest College/Northwestern UP) and The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History: Tolson, Hughes, Baraka (Palgrave), and four collections of poetry and experimental prose including Biting Midge: Works in Prose (Belladonna) and Some Vague Wife (Atelos Press). Her first collection of poems, Re dress, was chosen by Pulitzer Prize-winner Forest Gander for the Michael Rubin Award from San Francisco State University.

Dr. Schultz’s scholarship appears or is forthcoming in highly selective journals including African American Review, Contemporary Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, Plume Poetry: Essays and Commentary, and Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Her scholarly work has also been solicited for high profile anthologies, including The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics Since 1900 (Cambridge UP), Rethinking the North American Long Poem: Matter, Form, Experiment (U of New Mexico P), and Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka (Ohio State UP). Her poetry is published widely in journals and anthologies including Bombay Gin, Cleaver Magazine, Fence Magazine, Hambone, Miracle Monocle, New American Writing, P Queue Literary Journal, Efforts and Affections: Women Poets on Mentorship (U of Iowa P) and she performs her work, “Trio,” on the album, The Colored Waiting Room, by Dr. Guy’s MusiQologY.

Dr. Schultz is in demand as a speaker worldwide. She has been invited to speak internationally at the University of Basel, Switzerland; the University of Montreal, Canada; the University of Fribourg, Switzerland; and to present for a Surrealist Women Panel celebrating International Women’s Day for Chez Max et Dorothea (Seillans, France) that was viewed in Africa, North America, and Europe. In the U.S., she has been a plenary speaker at the University of California, Berkeley; the National Poetry at the University of Maine and others.

She is also active in digital humanities. She has been invited to record podcasts at the Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania for the National Poetry Foundation and to write podcasts for Remarkable Receptions, a public-facing humanities project on African American novels sponsored by the Black Literature Network, a joint project from African American literary studies at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the History of Black Writing at the University of Kansas, funded by the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Engaged Scholarship: Kristoffer Scott Berlin, Psychology

Kristoffer Berlin is Professor in the Department of Psychology, an Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center, Memphis, and a licensed clinical psychologist with health service provider designation in the state of Tennessee. He completed his PhD in Clinical Psychology (2007) from the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee and his predoctoral Clinical Internship and Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brown Medical School in Pediatric Psychology (2007-2009). Berlin is the past recipient Donald K. Routh Early Career Award in Pediatric Psychology (2013), the Society of Pediatric Psychology (SPP) Targeted Research Grant (2015), and the SPP Diversity Research Award (2008). In 2020 he became a Fellow, American Psychological Association (Div. 54, Society of Pediatric Psychology).

As an established health equity researcher and community engaged scholar, his program of research in pediatric diabetes is focused on the cultural, familial, and behavioral factors that promote wellness and reduce morbidity among families made vulnerable to disparate outcomes given their positionality amid intersecting ecological systems of inequality (e.g. racism, classism, sexism, ableism, regionalism, and ageism). Since arriving in Memphis in 2010, his interdisciplinary, community based, collaborative scholarship with LeBonheur Children's Hospital has sought to improve the social, emotional, and medical wellness of youth living with diabetes and their families. Over the past decade, this work has engaged numerous students (over 20 graduate degree milestone projects) at LeBonheur Children's Hospital and connects university outreach with LeBonheur's goals of enhancing health and well-being through high-quality, evidence-based, innovative and compassionate care.  

Dr. Berlin is currently the site PI of an award from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health (R01 MD018583, PI: Ellis), entitled "Family mHealth Intervention to Improve Health Outcomes in Black Youth with Type 1 Diabetes: A Multi-Center Randomized Controlled Trial."  This five-year project will develop an intervention aimed at improving health outcomes in Black youth with type 1 diabetes. Along with his colleagues at University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center, Memphis, Wayne State University in Detroit, and Children's National Hospital in Washington D.C., this project will test a brief intervention delivered through mobile health technology intended to optimize family interactions related to diabetes care. Family-based interventions have commonly been used as a strategy to promote optimal adolescent health, but few randomized clinical trials have focused on the needs of Black adolescents with the disease.